The Orion capsule, which successfully completed the Artemis II mission, landed in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California at 20:07 US east coast local time (03:07 Turkey time).
The Orion capsule, with its crew consisting of commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, broke the record for the farthest distance it has ever traveled from our planet (approximately 407 thousand kilometers), and then met the ocean waters exactly at the predicted time.
While the capsule, which landed in the ocean at a speed of 30 kilometers per hour, was waiting for it to cool down, aid teams approached the capsule with boats and contact was established with the astronauts who completed the landing.
The Artemis II crew covered a distance of nearly 1 million 118 thousand kilometers during their 10-day mission flight around the Earth and the Moon.
The team, consisting of a total of 4 astronauts, tested the systems on the spacecraft during the mission, imaged previously unseen parts of the Moon, and explored areas where landings could be made in future missions.
Although NASA’s Artemis II mission team did not land on the Moon’s surface, it managed to take the closest and clearest photographs of the Moon, and this mission performed an important mission as a preparation step for the Artemis III mission, which aims to land on the Moon.
Artemis II astronauts made history as the first team to see and image parts of the Moon that had never been seen by the human eye before.
The Orion capsule was launched from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on April 1 as part of the Artemis II mission.
Within two hours of landing, the crew will be removed from the spacecraft and transported by helicopters to the USS John P. Murtha, where they will undergo medical examination.
